There seems to be great costs to whatever research steps we take, even ones we intend to be empowering. In her 2005 essay on positionality, Khan points out the paradoxes of her role as "native informant." Although she is an inside informant, what she says about Pakistani women is not always what the Western public chooses to hear. Her research is always subject to willful interpretation. If Khan writes an affadavit to help grant asylum to Pakistani women fleeing their families, the West will interpret it as 'yes, West is best!,' not realizing that the women are fleeing partly as a result of Western political interventions, nor accounting for the patriachal practices still present in the West. Although Khan draws (and wishes to draw) public attention to Pakistani women's experiences, she is aware that this publicity could do more harm than good. "Such awareness could also help generate rescue missions," she writes, "The bombing of Afghanistan provides an example." She knows she cannot directly help the women imprisoned under the Zina ordinance who tell her their stories, and that aiding the women seeking asylum means hurting Pakistani men's chances to successfully seek U.S. visas. Even though she is striving to help Pakistani women, she sees that the biggest obstacles to the effectiveness of her transnational work are Western located. Khan yearns for greater direct action, touting an expansive transnational feminism that bridges the local and the global.
Kesby (2005), in his article on negotiating power in participatory approaches, describes a similar allure to direct action. Participatory research, sometimes employed as a feminist methodology, is no longer a fringe method used strictly by activists. As participatory research becomes less marginal, Kesby warns that participatory research risks being recolonizing; "power is most effective and most insiduous where it is normalized." As an increasingly normalized approach, participation has been subject to necessary critique.
But Kesby's purpose is to defend participatory approaches from the obliteration of total critical destruction. To say participatory approaches are now just recolonizing efforts, or worse, a wolf of tyrranical power in participatory sheep's clothing, is unhelpful. "Calls for resistance to all forms of power are unnecessarily immobilizing and must seem to emanate from a rather privileged positionality," he writes. Kesby provides the example of participatory action and research on HIV prevention in Ghana, suggesting that it was likely better for him to encourage the Ghanian women in his study to participate in safe sex training instead of encouraging them to "resist" the tyrannical power of the participatory approach.
Khan and Kesby offer similar solutions to their dilemmas of positionality. Khan seems to see no clear way to aid Pakistani women within an oppressive, clouded Western interpretation of her research, and argues that 1) "accountability and transparency" as well as "connect[ing] local patriarchies to global ones and develop[ing] a transnational feminist analysis" are the best recourses. Kesby reminds us that all approaches, even ones with empowerment as their goal, should be considered "contestable, imperfect work[s] in progress" that are "subject to future challenge and transformation." The native informant role is a compromised role. Participatory approaches are compromised approaches. Being accountable, transparent, and recognizing that every approach we employ is merely the best tool for now, not the perfect tool, is perhaps the surest path we have to reconciling our own positions.
Monday, September 27, 2010
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Because we already know what happens if we do not try
"Can a white, middle class, heterosexual man teach about racism, classism, heterosexism, and sexism? And if so, should he?"
This is the question the professor of my "Teaching Sociology" pedagogy class wrote on the board at the start of one memorable class session about a year and a half ago. She asked our class to share our response to that question.
One (white, middle class, heterosexual) male said, "Yes, of course. We should be objective and practice value-free sociology when we teach."
The professor asked if there were any other comments to add. A (white, working class, ambiguously queer) woman said, "Yes, of course, because he should be trained to teach every field. Like, say I teach Introduction to Sociology. Even though I don't study them, I need to be able to teach about race and gender and sexuality just like I need to be able to teach about criminology and families, even though I don't study those, either."
These two students, within moments, articulated a shared expectation that value-free research is both acheivable and desirable, two things Harding and Norberg (2005) state it is not. Despite decades of feminist arguements to the contrary, it is still possible to obtain a doctorate in sociology believing that 'objective' and 'value-free' are realistic and preferable goals. Believe me, I have witnessed it first hand.
The man's comments, cynic that I am, did not surprise me. The woman's, however, were jarring. Her words pointed to a much more insidiuous pathology in a discipline divided by numerous fields...that "race" and "class" and "gender" and "sexuality" are merely fields of study. The question was not whether this hypothetically uber privileged man could teach the sociology of race or class or gender or sexuality, but if he could teach racism, classism, heterosexism, and sexism. She saw the '-isms' and saw "separate fields of study some other sociologists do." The woman's response showed that she felt race, class, gender, and sexuality were not already part of every other field of study. She saw race, class, gender, and sexuality as separate from the rest of sociology, separate from, even, the rest of her life. There were things to 'study' or 'subjects' teach, not power structures embedded in the fabric of our institutions. Not unavoidable. Not inescapable. She could put them away in a folder and teach them next week.
That is the myth feminist methodology saves us from, as Harding and Norberg claim. Because to think otherwise is to resign ourselves to our doom. If we do not see these hierarchies as always already present, then we are indeed "complicit in the exercise of power." While it is true that, for the past few weeks, the complications of attempting to account for this ever present power has left us feeling as though there is no right path, it seems that attempting to account for this ever present power means we do avoid a definitively wrong one.
Even Harding and Norberg write, "In spite of feminists' heroic attempts to eliminate such power differences, this goal has proved impossible." See?! All the generations of brilliant, fierce, badass feminists that have come before us have ALSO never managed to be perfectly power-neutral researchers! Instead of feeling defeated by this (or feeling pressured to be the first to come to some miraculous, publishable and tenure-worthy conclusion), perhaps we can take consolation in it. That we are still trying to eliminate power differences means, well, that we are still trying to eliminate power differences. That the battle wages on means that we're still fighting it. No one has shrugged their shoulders and said, "You know what? *pops knuckles of white privilege* I'm going where people don't recognize that I am the default racial position. It's time to colonize people and call it objective!" Through all the brambles and overgrowth, we keep striving to make a new path. Sometimes we must pause in desperation, or when the grief of it all is too much to bear, but pausing is not the same as stopping.
Never, ever, ever, ever forget that we are still here. And we will keep trying, together, in the face of all its impossiblities, to prove the goal possible.
This is the question the professor of my "Teaching Sociology" pedagogy class wrote on the board at the start of one memorable class session about a year and a half ago. She asked our class to share our response to that question.
One (white, middle class, heterosexual) male said, "Yes, of course. We should be objective and practice value-free sociology when we teach."
The professor asked if there were any other comments to add. A (white, working class, ambiguously queer) woman said, "Yes, of course, because he should be trained to teach every field. Like, say I teach Introduction to Sociology. Even though I don't study them, I need to be able to teach about race and gender and sexuality just like I need to be able to teach about criminology and families, even though I don't study those, either."
These two students, within moments, articulated a shared expectation that value-free research is both acheivable and desirable, two things Harding and Norberg (2005) state it is not. Despite decades of feminist arguements to the contrary, it is still possible to obtain a doctorate in sociology believing that 'objective' and 'value-free' are realistic and preferable goals. Believe me, I have witnessed it first hand.
The man's comments, cynic that I am, did not surprise me. The woman's, however, were jarring. Her words pointed to a much more insidiuous pathology in a discipline divided by numerous fields...that "race" and "class" and "gender" and "sexuality" are merely fields of study. The question was not whether this hypothetically uber privileged man could teach the sociology of race or class or gender or sexuality, but if he could teach racism, classism, heterosexism, and sexism. She saw the '-isms' and saw "separate fields of study some other sociologists do." The woman's response showed that she felt race, class, gender, and sexuality were not already part of every other field of study. She saw race, class, gender, and sexuality as separate from the rest of sociology, separate from, even, the rest of her life. There were things to 'study' or 'subjects' teach, not power structures embedded in the fabric of our institutions. Not unavoidable. Not inescapable. She could put them away in a folder and teach them next week.
That is the myth feminist methodology saves us from, as Harding and Norberg claim. Because to think otherwise is to resign ourselves to our doom. If we do not see these hierarchies as always already present, then we are indeed "complicit in the exercise of power." While it is true that, for the past few weeks, the complications of attempting to account for this ever present power has left us feeling as though there is no right path, it seems that attempting to account for this ever present power means we do avoid a definitively wrong one.
Even Harding and Norberg write, "In spite of feminists' heroic attempts to eliminate such power differences, this goal has proved impossible." See?! All the generations of brilliant, fierce, badass feminists that have come before us have ALSO never managed to be perfectly power-neutral researchers! Instead of feeling defeated by this (or feeling pressured to be the first to come to some miraculous, publishable and tenure-worthy conclusion), perhaps we can take consolation in it. That we are still trying to eliminate power differences means, well, that we are still trying to eliminate power differences. That the battle wages on means that we're still fighting it. No one has shrugged their shoulders and said, "You know what? *pops knuckles of white privilege* I'm going where people don't recognize that I am the default racial position. It's time to colonize people and call it objective!" Through all the brambles and overgrowth, we keep striving to make a new path. Sometimes we must pause in desperation, or when the grief of it all is too much to bear, but pausing is not the same as stopping.
Never, ever, ever, ever forget that we are still here. And we will keep trying, together, in the face of all its impossiblities, to prove the goal possible.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
The problem (and salvation) of experience
Experience is sometimes horribly ill-used. Who of us hasn't groaned when another student raises their hand and begins to speak about how "one time" or "this friend of mine" or "in my mother's case," and goes on to extol a glittering individual example that is meant to undermine an entire body of research to the contrary? Individual examples do not render empirical patterns irrelevant. As individuals, we all have a multitude of experiences that may or may not fit general patterns - but that doesn't mean those patterns don't exist.
It also doesn't mean that there aren't many, many, many examples of individual experiences that do fit this empirical patterns. Given conversations about inequality, privilege, and oppression, it is those examples of 'experience' that are usually not afforded space or legitimacy. These are experiences that I feel are dangerous to invalidate as merely discursive constructions. Scott (1991) argues that 'experience' is discursive and often wrongly used to 'naturalize' difference. Although Scott says that "subjects...are constituted through experience," we must be careful not to take this to mean that this construction doesn't have very real, harmful social consequences. Subjects are not necessarily the ones doing the constructing, which is a tenuous point that can easily be missed.
Experience, particulary that of people of color, indicates that race and the race hierarchy is very real. The experiences of lesbians, gays, and bisexuals indicate that hegemonic gender and sexual norms are very real. The experience of trans folks and women indicates that gender is very real. Even McDowell (1992) suggests that it is women's 'experience' as women that has lead to feminist researchers' inclination to study subjects with substantive social concerns.
But this experience is complicated, as McDowell is wary of essentializing a feminist identity and ascribing masculinity and femininity to particular methodologies (i.e. quantiative methods are masculine methods; qualitative methods are feminine methods). This is perhaps a mistinterpretation of what feminism is suggesting. McDowell notes that small-scale qualitative studies are "assumed... [to] draw on women's (purported) abilities to listen, to empathize, and to validate personal experiences as part of the research process," but it seems to me that feminists are arguing that qualitative studies allow for all of us to draw on our shared abilities to listen, empathize, and validate personal experiences. These are not essentialist notions of women researchers, but offer what convential methodologies deny or dismiss as unimportant. McDowell cautions against an over-valorizing of feminist methods, but I question whether this is a justified critique. (When men praise conventional methods, does anyone suggest they are over-valorizing them?) The point is that conventional methods do not have to be valorized - they are already normalized. We must valorize feminist methods because otherwise, who would champion them? More importantly, if we didn't say they were worth doing, who would ever do them? Sometimes you have to yell to be heard above a downpour, and feminist researchers who tout feminist methods may risk over-valorizing them rather than be silently drenched.
McDowell goes on to cite Hill Collins, who suggests we must strive to "decolonize our minds" although none of us can escape from "hegemonic notions of knowledge." In that sense, claiming any particular method is preferable or better is unhelpful. It seems best to just acknowledge the subjectivity of experience, a feminist tenet that has dramatically challenged conventional methodologies as well as those that are termed 'feminist' (McDowell 1992). Feminist scholarship faces intense pressure to conform, at least somewhat, to conventional methodologies in order to be seen as 'legitimate' or publishable. This may largely explain why McDowell could not locate feminist geography research that had been overly reflexive about the researcher's subjectivity or analytic of "the particular position of women as researchers." I would argue that the disciplinary pressure feminist researchers face cannot be taken so lightly. Critiquing women for "remain[ing] relatively absent from her text" doesn't seem fair given why women may strive to legitimize their research by removing themselves from it. Citing the 'experience of difference' as women is not necessarily encouraged in academic work, which pretends to be masculinist, objective, neutral, and value-free.
McDowell does return to this complication with more nuance and forgiveness, acknowledging that women in the academy have a tendency to become "a surrogate man" in order to compensate for marginality. (Consider nearly two decades later, C. J. Pascoe's selected attire of plain t-shirts and cargo pants in an attempt to become "degendered" in her research for Dude, You're a Fag is an example of how "de-gendered" really just means "less like a 'woman' and more like a 'man.'") She concludes that "we must recognize and take account of our own position, as well as that of our research participants, and write this into our research practice rather than continue to hanker after some idealized equality between us."
Can't we write our subjectivity into our research practice while still hankering away with our idealized notions? I'd hate to think this is an either/or crossroads. It is a hard line to tow, this post modern critique of 'experience' as discursive and of feminism as too structural and essentializing. Even though Scott argues that noting the construction of experience "does not mean that one dismisses the effects of such concepts and identities," it is all too easy to imply that the 'experience of difference' reifies difference itself. And although McDowell cautions against the relativism of post modernism, but even she admits how easily post modernism dismisses any structured feminism, even if it led to post modern feminism. I am concerned that, in striving to complicate essentialism, we miss a very essential recognition of structures.
Allow me to conclude with a quote that I feel sums up the complications. In a debate about 'race' in The Black Scholar, Jon Michael Spencer attacked "the postmodern conspiracy to explode racial identity" and argued that "to relinquish the notion of race - even though it's a cruel hoax - at this particular time is to relinquish our fortress against the powers and principalities that still try to undermine us." Acknowledging the very real experiences of marginalized groups is acknowleging that marginalization is happening. A movement away from that is, perhaps, a most unfortunate path to take. It may also be an exercise in self-harm, because we lose sight of the structures themselves and, most importantly, those oppressed by them.
In the end, I guess we can always chalk it up to experience.
It also doesn't mean that there aren't many, many, many examples of individual experiences that do fit this empirical patterns. Given conversations about inequality, privilege, and oppression, it is those examples of 'experience' that are usually not afforded space or legitimacy. These are experiences that I feel are dangerous to invalidate as merely discursive constructions. Scott (1991) argues that 'experience' is discursive and often wrongly used to 'naturalize' difference. Although Scott says that "subjects...are constituted through experience," we must be careful not to take this to mean that this construction doesn't have very real, harmful social consequences. Subjects are not necessarily the ones doing the constructing, which is a tenuous point that can easily be missed.
Experience, particulary that of people of color, indicates that race and the race hierarchy is very real. The experiences of lesbians, gays, and bisexuals indicate that hegemonic gender and sexual norms are very real. The experience of trans folks and women indicates that gender is very real. Even McDowell (1992) suggests that it is women's 'experience' as women that has lead to feminist researchers' inclination to study subjects with substantive social concerns.
But this experience is complicated, as McDowell is wary of essentializing a feminist identity and ascribing masculinity and femininity to particular methodologies (i.e. quantiative methods are masculine methods; qualitative methods are feminine methods). This is perhaps a mistinterpretation of what feminism is suggesting. McDowell notes that small-scale qualitative studies are "assumed... [to] draw on women's (purported) abilities to listen, to empathize, and to validate personal experiences as part of the research process," but it seems to me that feminists are arguing that qualitative studies allow for all of us to draw on our shared abilities to listen, empathize, and validate personal experiences. These are not essentialist notions of women researchers, but offer what convential methodologies deny or dismiss as unimportant. McDowell cautions against an over-valorizing of feminist methods, but I question whether this is a justified critique. (When men praise conventional methods, does anyone suggest they are over-valorizing them?) The point is that conventional methods do not have to be valorized - they are already normalized. We must valorize feminist methods because otherwise, who would champion them? More importantly, if we didn't say they were worth doing, who would ever do them? Sometimes you have to yell to be heard above a downpour, and feminist researchers who tout feminist methods may risk over-valorizing them rather than be silently drenched.
McDowell goes on to cite Hill Collins, who suggests we must strive to "decolonize our minds" although none of us can escape from "hegemonic notions of knowledge." In that sense, claiming any particular method is preferable or better is unhelpful. It seems best to just acknowledge the subjectivity of experience, a feminist tenet that has dramatically challenged conventional methodologies as well as those that are termed 'feminist' (McDowell 1992). Feminist scholarship faces intense pressure to conform, at least somewhat, to conventional methodologies in order to be seen as 'legitimate' or publishable. This may largely explain why McDowell could not locate feminist geography research that had been overly reflexive about the researcher's subjectivity or analytic of "the particular position of women as researchers." I would argue that the disciplinary pressure feminist researchers face cannot be taken so lightly. Critiquing women for "remain[ing] relatively absent from her text" doesn't seem fair given why women may strive to legitimize their research by removing themselves from it. Citing the 'experience of difference' as women is not necessarily encouraged in academic work, which pretends to be masculinist, objective, neutral, and value-free.
McDowell does return to this complication with more nuance and forgiveness, acknowledging that women in the academy have a tendency to become "a surrogate man" in order to compensate for marginality. (Consider nearly two decades later, C. J. Pascoe's selected attire of plain t-shirts and cargo pants in an attempt to become "degendered" in her research for Dude, You're a Fag is an example of how "de-gendered" really just means "less like a 'woman' and more like a 'man.'") She concludes that "we must recognize and take account of our own position, as well as that of our research participants, and write this into our research practice rather than continue to hanker after some idealized equality between us."
Can't we write our subjectivity into our research practice while still hankering away with our idealized notions? I'd hate to think this is an either/or crossroads. It is a hard line to tow, this post modern critique of 'experience' as discursive and of feminism as too structural and essentializing. Even though Scott argues that noting the construction of experience "does not mean that one dismisses the effects of such concepts and identities," it is all too easy to imply that the 'experience of difference' reifies difference itself. And although McDowell cautions against the relativism of post modernism, but even she admits how easily post modernism dismisses any structured feminism, even if it led to post modern feminism. I am concerned that, in striving to complicate essentialism, we miss a very essential recognition of structures.
Allow me to conclude with a quote that I feel sums up the complications. In a debate about 'race' in The Black Scholar, Jon Michael Spencer attacked "the postmodern conspiracy to explode racial identity" and argued that "to relinquish the notion of race - even though it's a cruel hoax - at this particular time is to relinquish our fortress against the powers and principalities that still try to undermine us." Acknowledging the very real experiences of marginalized groups is acknowleging that marginalization is happening. A movement away from that is, perhaps, a most unfortunate path to take. It may also be an exercise in self-harm, because we lose sight of the structures themselves and, most importantly, those oppressed by them.
In the end, I guess we can always chalk it up to experience.
Getting over ourselves
The research field is full of suprises, and not always in the data we collect. Rather ironically, the research field itself shows us the limitations of all the training we have endured to be able to pretend to be effective field researchers. The lived reality of field research very often turns out to be full of the complexities and challenges no training includes, and it uncovers all of the problematic assumptions we make about a research field before we enter it. Acknowledging these problematic assumptions is pretty embarassing, especially if we have claimed to have a lens that avoids these pitfalls, but instead falls right into them. Sometimes we find out that we are not as made of feminist awesomeness as we'd like to think we are.
In "Can you Belly Dance?", Miraftab (2004) analyzes her experiences as a Western-trained scholar interviewing women who were heads of their households in Mexico. Miraftab, exiled from Iran, received her doctorate in the U.S. Her darker complexion meant she did not "look" white (where white = 'American' or 'Western'), but her Spanish was Persian-accented, so she was read as a foreigner by the women she studied. Rather than interpret her as a privileged Western woman because of her educational background, the women in her interviews often saw her as sharing a "common identity" of being from another "'poor' country." Due to the Western portrayal of Muslims and a recent biased television movie about Iranian gender relations, the women understood Iran to be a place that was worse for women than Mexico, and expressed sympathy for Miraftab with comments like, "you must be very happy to be here." Moreover, the slanted Western media depiction of Persian women meant Miraftab was routinely questioned if she wore the veil and if she could belly dance. Miraftab's status was also negotiated through the Mexican women's values, not just Western values imposed through multimedia. Since Miraftab was childless, the women saw her as having "missed out on...a woman's only true asset."
With this, she shows the limitations of a Western/Non-Western framework of privilege as devised by Western feminists, where Western scholars must always be prepared to account for their privilege. This framework, she argues, indicates a superiority complex. Through presuming we will already be in a privileged, superior position, we also presume the Global South women we interview will be "passive: objectifed, mute, and lacking any source of power vis-a-vis the researcher." Basically, we make ourselves out to be pretentious, condescending jerks. Our reflexivity with regard to our privilege in the research field, in this sense, is hampered because we take our superior status for granted, and, conversely, we presume our participants to be inferior and underprivileged in relation to us.
Miraftab acknowledges that she was, in many ways, in a privileged position relative to her interview participants, and it is interesting to note that the perception of her was heavily created by a dominant Western colonializing depiction. However, the women she interviewed did not always see her as more privileged or powerful. Miraftab's training prepared her to assume she would be in the powerful position and that this power would be taken for granted, but instead her 'superior' researcher role was interrogated, questioned, and played with because of the participant's autonomous understandings and expressions of their own power.
The insider/outsider role is far more complex and varied than the Western/Non-Western paradigm makes it out to be. Miraftab's experiences challenges us to not enter a research field presuming our privilege and power over the women we study is a given. Attempts to account for our privilege/power risks "re-objectifying the subject" when we don't always have that total, overarching privilege/power to begin with.
In "Can you Belly Dance?", Miraftab (2004) analyzes her experiences as a Western-trained scholar interviewing women who were heads of their households in Mexico. Miraftab, exiled from Iran, received her doctorate in the U.S. Her darker complexion meant she did not "look" white (where white = 'American' or 'Western'), but her Spanish was Persian-accented, so she was read as a foreigner by the women she studied. Rather than interpret her as a privileged Western woman because of her educational background, the women in her interviews often saw her as sharing a "common identity" of being from another "'poor' country." Due to the Western portrayal of Muslims and a recent biased television movie about Iranian gender relations, the women understood Iran to be a place that was worse for women than Mexico, and expressed sympathy for Miraftab with comments like, "you must be very happy to be here." Moreover, the slanted Western media depiction of Persian women meant Miraftab was routinely questioned if she wore the veil and if she could belly dance. Miraftab's status was also negotiated through the Mexican women's values, not just Western values imposed through multimedia. Since Miraftab was childless, the women saw her as having "missed out on...a woman's only true asset."
With this, she shows the limitations of a Western/Non-Western framework of privilege as devised by Western feminists, where Western scholars must always be prepared to account for their privilege. This framework, she argues, indicates a superiority complex. Through presuming we will already be in a privileged, superior position, we also presume the Global South women we interview will be "passive: objectifed, mute, and lacking any source of power vis-a-vis the researcher." Basically, we make ourselves out to be pretentious, condescending jerks. Our reflexivity with regard to our privilege in the research field, in this sense, is hampered because we take our superior status for granted, and, conversely, we presume our participants to be inferior and underprivileged in relation to us.
Miraftab acknowledges that she was, in many ways, in a privileged position relative to her interview participants, and it is interesting to note that the perception of her was heavily created by a dominant Western colonializing depiction. However, the women she interviewed did not always see her as more privileged or powerful. Miraftab's training prepared her to assume she would be in the powerful position and that this power would be taken for granted, but instead her 'superior' researcher role was interrogated, questioned, and played with because of the participant's autonomous understandings and expressions of their own power.
The insider/outsider role is far more complex and varied than the Western/Non-Western paradigm makes it out to be. Miraftab's experiences challenges us to not enter a research field presuming our privilege and power over the women we study is a given. Attempts to account for our privilege/power risks "re-objectifying the subject" when we don't always have that total, overarching privilege/power to begin with.
Friday, September 17, 2010
Rejecting femininity is still misogyny
When I moved to New York state from the southeast two years ago, I stopped wearing skirts. This was partly because I was freezing. Skirts make so much more sense in the sticky humidity of the southeast, but not so much when by September it's already 40 degrees at night and the first snow is at the end of October. This is clearly not skirt weather. After that first winter, it took seven months before anything resembling skirt weather returned, and by that time, I had just lost the habit of wearing them. They didn't seem to fit so well on me, or look familiar and expected. I felt out of place with myself, so I put them away in a drawer and bought some bermuda shorts.
The other, more weighty reason that I stopped wearing skirts is that I simply stopped feeling powerful in them. I had never felt vulnerable in skirts before, but now I did. I found myself keeping my knees together. Being aware of how windy it was and in which direction it was blowing. Avoiding plopping down on the grass or sidewalk. But it was more than that, even. Skirts suddenly felt limiting in terms of my movement, but I also felt more...something else. More feminine.
And it was a painful realization to me felt uncomfortable being seen as feminine, or at least wearing-a-skirt-feminine. This was so painful a realization that I quite promptly stopped thinking about it. I moved the skirts from a drawer to a cardboard box hidden in a nook beside my fridge.
But the political nature of clothes, like Kingston's white ghosts, continued to haunt me. It's not that I am uncomfortable with an ambiguous gender presentation. If anything, I have had a long exposure to ambiguity. When I was three, my mother took my twin sister and I to the hair salon and asked her hair sylist to cut off our hair (you know, that popular early 90s boy cut for little girls). I still remember my first shocked glance in the mirror, thinking that I looked just like two little boys my sister and I occasionally played with. I knew, at three, that to have my hair cut that way was a gendered statement.
For the next ten years, my sister and I were regularly chastised out of women's bathrooms. When trans folks talk about how one of the most rigidly gendered spaces are bathrooms - gendered to the degree of violent and brutal enforcement - I know what it is they mean. I do not know the every day anguish of attempting to enter a gendered bathroom in which you may not be able to 'pass' as a member as a transgender adult, but I do know what it is like to be chastised by looming grown-up women, to be told not so politely that you are in the 'wrong' place, or to be told to get out, that you do not belong. To have to defend myself and define my gender, even as a small child.
When I was twelve, I grew out my hair. That is the only period in my life that I know of when I have not been called "sir" or read as male. For seven years I was only read as 'girl' or 'woman,' and I attribute that almost entirely to having longer hair, which sat in a chin-length bob. But I grew disenchanted with longer hair. Like my mother (who also has very short hair) warned me, it wasn't as great as I thought it would be. I cut my hair short again when I was 19, and it has stayed short ever since.
I travel regularly, and at the airport I am invariably mistaken for a man. Between my shortish hair and flat-chest, I can wear women's cut slacks and a women's t-shirt and a women's cut sweatshirt and still occasionally be "sir'd" by those who are reading superficial clues. To be mistaken for male no longer bothers me the way it upset me as a child - if anything, I am happy that it happens, and do not correct them. Judith Lorber writes that for children, gender means sameness, and as a child I wanted very much to be seen as a girl. Now it doesn't matter so much. It is perhaps more important to blur the lines, to challenge what we interpret as 'woman' or 'man.'
If anything, the ghosts that haunt me now are less about defending myself to gender policing adults, and all about what it means to be read as feminine. Queer women face a particularly difficult line between the masculine and the feminine. If we dress as feminine, we may be exerting passing privilege and risk critique from less gender-conforming lesbians. And if we dress as masculine, how butch is butch enough? And who is making up all these rules, anyway?
I enjoy the greater flexibility women have in their clothing choices. I am very thankful that, in the social construction of gender, women are permitted to pass off airy, tank-top blouses as professional wear. I make the most use of that in the summer months. But what I have found is that I feel most comfortable in different clothes around different groups of people. And that what I put on one day feels marvelous, but can feel limiting and embarassing a week later.
Much of this comes from others projecting their own insecurities on us, or us internalizing anxieties that are totally unncessary for changing a damn thing. At the start of this summer, I was wearing (what I thought was) a pretty tank top. A queer woman remarked on how I had gotten "frilly" with my clothing choices. Although I laughed it off as joke, I am sad to admit that I have only worn plain t-shirts around her since. Her comment made me, for a short time, hate that tank top. More specifically, it made me hate that part of me that had loved the tank top. But that hate is useless, and could only keep me from lifting my head and raising my voice. I let my (and her!) insecurities, bred in me through years of socialization, win.
This hate is what I have been trying to talk about. Patriarchy has convinced us that women should both a) dress a particular way and b) that this particular way is less powerful than how men dress. We have been conditioned to project masculine power and feminine subordinance into the styles of the fabric we wear. Clothing embodies this very hierarchy.
Sometimes I jokingly describe my professional clothes as "power femme." This might be dangerous, though, because it implies that to be femme is to not be powerful. And that is what I am coming to grips with. My gender politicization has only made it more difficult for me to dress myself. I can't tell if I am supporting patriarchy when I wear feminine clothing, or supporting patriarchy when I express disgust of feminine clothing. (Consider even my earlier blog where I chastened lipstick choices...that, too, is an unfortunate rejection of femininity, although, I still maintain, an appropriate example of rather trivial Western 'choices.') Unfortunately, I think that both are, in their own ways, patriarchal.
Because to reject femininity, even a femininity that is cultured by and defined by patriarchy, is still misogyny. And as long as we use these rules, we will never feel comfortable or stunning or whole.
The other, more weighty reason that I stopped wearing skirts is that I simply stopped feeling powerful in them. I had never felt vulnerable in skirts before, but now I did. I found myself keeping my knees together. Being aware of how windy it was and in which direction it was blowing. Avoiding plopping down on the grass or sidewalk. But it was more than that, even. Skirts suddenly felt limiting in terms of my movement, but I also felt more...something else. More feminine.
And it was a painful realization to me felt uncomfortable being seen as feminine, or at least wearing-a-skirt-feminine. This was so painful a realization that I quite promptly stopped thinking about it. I moved the skirts from a drawer to a cardboard box hidden in a nook beside my fridge.
But the political nature of clothes, like Kingston's white ghosts, continued to haunt me. It's not that I am uncomfortable with an ambiguous gender presentation. If anything, I have had a long exposure to ambiguity. When I was three, my mother took my twin sister and I to the hair salon and asked her hair sylist to cut off our hair (you know, that popular early 90s boy cut for little girls). I still remember my first shocked glance in the mirror, thinking that I looked just like two little boys my sister and I occasionally played with. I knew, at three, that to have my hair cut that way was a gendered statement.
For the next ten years, my sister and I were regularly chastised out of women's bathrooms. When trans folks talk about how one of the most rigidly gendered spaces are bathrooms - gendered to the degree of violent and brutal enforcement - I know what it is they mean. I do not know the every day anguish of attempting to enter a gendered bathroom in which you may not be able to 'pass' as a member as a transgender adult, but I do know what it is like to be chastised by looming grown-up women, to be told not so politely that you are in the 'wrong' place, or to be told to get out, that you do not belong. To have to defend myself and define my gender, even as a small child.
When I was twelve, I grew out my hair. That is the only period in my life that I know of when I have not been called "sir" or read as male. For seven years I was only read as 'girl' or 'woman,' and I attribute that almost entirely to having longer hair, which sat in a chin-length bob. But I grew disenchanted with longer hair. Like my mother (who also has very short hair) warned me, it wasn't as great as I thought it would be. I cut my hair short again when I was 19, and it has stayed short ever since.
I travel regularly, and at the airport I am invariably mistaken for a man. Between my shortish hair and flat-chest, I can wear women's cut slacks and a women's t-shirt and a women's cut sweatshirt and still occasionally be "sir'd" by those who are reading superficial clues. To be mistaken for male no longer bothers me the way it upset me as a child - if anything, I am happy that it happens, and do not correct them. Judith Lorber writes that for children, gender means sameness, and as a child I wanted very much to be seen as a girl. Now it doesn't matter so much. It is perhaps more important to blur the lines, to challenge what we interpret as 'woman' or 'man.'
If anything, the ghosts that haunt me now are less about defending myself to gender policing adults, and all about what it means to be read as feminine. Queer women face a particularly difficult line between the masculine and the feminine. If we dress as feminine, we may be exerting passing privilege and risk critique from less gender-conforming lesbians. And if we dress as masculine, how butch is butch enough? And who is making up all these rules, anyway?
I enjoy the greater flexibility women have in their clothing choices. I am very thankful that, in the social construction of gender, women are permitted to pass off airy, tank-top blouses as professional wear. I make the most use of that in the summer months. But what I have found is that I feel most comfortable in different clothes around different groups of people. And that what I put on one day feels marvelous, but can feel limiting and embarassing a week later.
Much of this comes from others projecting their own insecurities on us, or us internalizing anxieties that are totally unncessary for changing a damn thing. At the start of this summer, I was wearing (what I thought was) a pretty tank top. A queer woman remarked on how I had gotten "frilly" with my clothing choices. Although I laughed it off as joke, I am sad to admit that I have only worn plain t-shirts around her since. Her comment made me, for a short time, hate that tank top. More specifically, it made me hate that part of me that had loved the tank top. But that hate is useless, and could only keep me from lifting my head and raising my voice. I let my (and her!) insecurities, bred in me through years of socialization, win.
This hate is what I have been trying to talk about. Patriarchy has convinced us that women should both a) dress a particular way and b) that this particular way is less powerful than how men dress. We have been conditioned to project masculine power and feminine subordinance into the styles of the fabric we wear. Clothing embodies this very hierarchy.
Sometimes I jokingly describe my professional clothes as "power femme." This might be dangerous, though, because it implies that to be femme is to not be powerful. And that is what I am coming to grips with. My gender politicization has only made it more difficult for me to dress myself. I can't tell if I am supporting patriarchy when I wear feminine clothing, or supporting patriarchy when I express disgust of feminine clothing. (Consider even my earlier blog where I chastened lipstick choices...that, too, is an unfortunate rejection of femininity, although, I still maintain, an appropriate example of rather trivial Western 'choices.') Unfortunately, I think that both are, in their own ways, patriarchal.
Because to reject femininity, even a femininity that is cultured by and defined by patriarchy, is still misogyny. And as long as we use these rules, we will never feel comfortable or stunning or whole.
Monday, September 13, 2010
Five things men must do
[Male Women's Studies Student recently posted an open question about what feminist men should teach other men about feminism. MWSS has consented to me posting my full response here.]
I write this with great caution. I am not the voice for all women, although for the sake of simplicity, I have condensed the discussion to one of women and men, knowing that all of the beautiful and painful complication is lost in the process. Forgive me for that. Please know that I myself occupy positions at the top of other hierarchies and have to check myself when I am in spaces led and motivated by ending the oppression of those at the bottom of them. My intention here is to outline some of the things men can and must do in teaching other men to be feminists and in being responsible about their own feminism. This is merely a draft of a list, as there are many things that could be added. I welcome those additions and any other critiques.
Teach men humility. Do not congratulate yourself for caring about women's oppression, or realizing that you have the capacity to care. There should be no patting yourself on the back for being here - you should be here. You are essential to the success of this movement, but, hey, so are we. Generations of women have being doing this work and it is on their shoulders that we are all are standing. You must also not expect progressive women to trust you instantaneously. Identifying as a feminist isn't enough - we must see you practice it. We must see you live it. You are accustomed to claiming expertise - don't. Don't expect to ever know more about women's experiences of oppression than women. Likewise, don't expect that there won't be many, many women you speak to or teach who are less able to articulate their own oppression than you are able to articulate their oppression. (Oppression works very well that way).
Teach men that they have unearned privilege. You must call out other men. Check them on rape jokes, racist jokes, gay jokes, dyke jokes, blonde jokes, and jokes about your momma. When they talk about 'special rights,' help them see where they have been treated 'specially' all along. Point out bias in movies, television, and magazines. To the best of your ability, ensure your home, workplace, and social gatherings are safe spaces for women of all races, religions, and incomes. Help other men realize this. Help men see the way in which masculinity suffocates them, squelches their emotional range, restricts their hearts, turns them into brutish, humanity-less humans. Help them see how patriarchy denies them their humanity but feminism embraces it. But be careful. Realize that we (or most of us) are working towards a world where both of our social categories will be eradicated. At the very least, we are working toward a world where your category doesn't determine the conditions of ours. So yes, you are constrained by masculinity - but it is a confinement that privileges you at the expense of us...you must not forget that. Teach men they are not 'oppressed' in the way that women are oppressed - such a malleable use of the term, as Marilyn Frye notes, renders oppression meaningless.
Teach men to account for their unearned privilege. You cannot refuse male privilege or give it up. It comes into the room with you. It is in the room even when you are not here. This privilege manifests is large and small ways. Think about how much space you take up. How much are you talking? How loud are you saying it? How wide are your legs spread? How often do you interrupt, and who do you interrupt more than others? Know that a critique of masculinity (or men as a social group) is not an individual attack on you. Know also that, in some ways, it is. If you feel guilty or badly about it, don't expect us to sympathize or process it with you. Part of our liberation means no longer being responsible for counseling you through your emotions. Teach other men to talk to male feminist leaders if you are insecure about your involvement with feminist women's activism. It may make you uncomfortable and insecure to surround yourself with fierce women, especially if you face ostracization from non-feminist men. But don't expect us to make you feel better about working with women - understand how insulting that may appear to us. Don't think that being marginalized in some other dimension (being Latino, being low-income, being queer) gives you greater access to understanding women's oppression or some closer claim to feminism. It may mean you understand marginalization, but it does not cancel out your male privilege.
Teach men they are not the first, nor the only. Don't recreate the wheel - many men have come before you. Read Allan Johnson, Robert Jensen, Jackson Katz, Steven Schacht, Michael Kimmel, Michael Messner, Robert Connell (and these are just a few of the white ones, in whose works other white men may see themselves reflected). Know they too have their flaws and are hampered. Build from them. Teach their work so that other men may know that they are not the first ones, that they are not isolated against the tide. Other men have done this, therefore you can, too. More importantly, don't forget to teach work by women - your analysis cannot come in from just reading works by white men. Your growth as men cannot come from just spending time talking about feminism with other men. If you teach, teach works by women of color, women from the Global South, women who are poor or working-class, women with disabilities. Even if you do not teach, read them. Know that there is a multiplicity of feminisms and that feminism itself is ever changing, ever growing.
Teach men to work with us, not for us. Don't teach men that we need men to save us, to be our leaders. Resist your chivalric impulses, and remember that earlier point about humility. The source of our oppression is, funnily enough, not the key to our liberation. We need you to educate and transform other men who will believe you more readily than us, but this doesn't mean you are inherently more believable or more entitled to preach feminism. Don't expect we want to or are ready to discuss where you fit in or what role you should take - many of us are still trying to figure out where we fit in, too. Learn to listen. Speak less and listen more. Lead less and listen more. Listening is essential to your transformation.
I write this with great caution. I am not the voice for all women, although for the sake of simplicity, I have condensed the discussion to one of women and men, knowing that all of the beautiful and painful complication is lost in the process. Forgive me for that. Please know that I myself occupy positions at the top of other hierarchies and have to check myself when I am in spaces led and motivated by ending the oppression of those at the bottom of them. My intention here is to outline some of the things men can and must do in teaching other men to be feminists and in being responsible about their own feminism. This is merely a draft of a list, as there are many things that could be added. I welcome those additions and any other critiques.
Teach men humility. Do not congratulate yourself for caring about women's oppression, or realizing that you have the capacity to care. There should be no patting yourself on the back for being here - you should be here. You are essential to the success of this movement, but, hey, so are we. Generations of women have being doing this work and it is on their shoulders that we are all are standing. You must also not expect progressive women to trust you instantaneously. Identifying as a feminist isn't enough - we must see you practice it. We must see you live it. You are accustomed to claiming expertise - don't. Don't expect to ever know more about women's experiences of oppression than women. Likewise, don't expect that there won't be many, many women you speak to or teach who are less able to articulate their own oppression than you are able to articulate their oppression. (Oppression works very well that way).
Teach men that they have unearned privilege. You must call out other men. Check them on rape jokes, racist jokes, gay jokes, dyke jokes, blonde jokes, and jokes about your momma. When they talk about 'special rights,' help them see where they have been treated 'specially' all along. Point out bias in movies, television, and magazines. To the best of your ability, ensure your home, workplace, and social gatherings are safe spaces for women of all races, religions, and incomes. Help other men realize this. Help men see the way in which masculinity suffocates them, squelches their emotional range, restricts their hearts, turns them into brutish, humanity-less humans. Help them see how patriarchy denies them their humanity but feminism embraces it. But be careful. Realize that we (or most of us) are working towards a world where both of our social categories will be eradicated. At the very least, we are working toward a world where your category doesn't determine the conditions of ours. So yes, you are constrained by masculinity - but it is a confinement that privileges you at the expense of us...you must not forget that. Teach men they are not 'oppressed' in the way that women are oppressed - such a malleable use of the term, as Marilyn Frye notes, renders oppression meaningless.
Teach men to account for their unearned privilege. You cannot refuse male privilege or give it up. It comes into the room with you. It is in the room even when you are not here. This privilege manifests is large and small ways. Think about how much space you take up. How much are you talking? How loud are you saying it? How wide are your legs spread? How often do you interrupt, and who do you interrupt more than others? Know that a critique of masculinity (or men as a social group) is not an individual attack on you. Know also that, in some ways, it is. If you feel guilty or badly about it, don't expect us to sympathize or process it with you. Part of our liberation means no longer being responsible for counseling you through your emotions. Teach other men to talk to male feminist leaders if you are insecure about your involvement with feminist women's activism. It may make you uncomfortable and insecure to surround yourself with fierce women, especially if you face ostracization from non-feminist men. But don't expect us to make you feel better about working with women - understand how insulting that may appear to us. Don't think that being marginalized in some other dimension (being Latino, being low-income, being queer) gives you greater access to understanding women's oppression or some closer claim to feminism. It may mean you understand marginalization, but it does not cancel out your male privilege.
Teach men they are not the first, nor the only. Don't recreate the wheel - many men have come before you. Read Allan Johnson, Robert Jensen, Jackson Katz, Steven Schacht, Michael Kimmel, Michael Messner, Robert Connell (and these are just a few of the white ones, in whose works other white men may see themselves reflected). Know they too have their flaws and are hampered. Build from them. Teach their work so that other men may know that they are not the first ones, that they are not isolated against the tide. Other men have done this, therefore you can, too. More importantly, don't forget to teach work by women - your analysis cannot come in from just reading works by white men. Your growth as men cannot come from just spending time talking about feminism with other men. If you teach, teach works by women of color, women from the Global South, women who are poor or working-class, women with disabilities. Even if you do not teach, read them. Know that there is a multiplicity of feminisms and that feminism itself is ever changing, ever growing.
Teach men to work with us, not for us. Don't teach men that we need men to save us, to be our leaders. Resist your chivalric impulses, and remember that earlier point about humility. The source of our oppression is, funnily enough, not the key to our liberation. We need you to educate and transform other men who will believe you more readily than us, but this doesn't mean you are inherently more believable or more entitled to preach feminism. Don't expect we want to or are ready to discuss where you fit in or what role you should take - many of us are still trying to figure out where we fit in, too. Learn to listen. Speak less and listen more. Lead less and listen more. Listening is essential to your transformation.
Local feminism for global change
I took an introduction to transgender studies my senior year of college. About halfway through the semester, our class got into a heated discussion about genital cutting. One white woman, who was part of a campus social justice group whose platform included advocating against female genital multilation (FGM...although the fact that we have termed it such implies our value judgment) in African countries, was deeply distressed by the comparison the instructor was making between FGM and gender assignment surgery for intersex babies and children in North America, especially the U.S. She insisted that the two could not be compared - gender assignment surgery in the U.S., however wrong, was surely less harmful than FGM.
I am not sure if this woman had ever been to an African country, much less if she had ever spoken to groups that practice genital cutting. Despite this, she was certain it was definitively different and definitively worse than genital cutting in the U.S. She was so sure that nothing could convince her otherwise, not even testimonies by those who have suffered incredible emotional and physical damage as a result of these 'compassionate' gender assignment surgeries performed without their consent.
Let me start by saying that ranking oppressions is futile and unhelpful - ultimately, both practices involve surgical procedures on healthy, functioning genitals. But this white woman was so sure that liberating darker-skinned girls from the throes of their culture's religious practices was preferable to - even a more worthwhile cause than - liberating U.S. babies from the throes of their culture's medical practices (which are informed by its religious practices, to be sure).
It seems far more appealing to be an advocate for monolithic Third World women rather than to understand and account for our own domestic hierarchies. This is the face of "the fantasy of rescue" (Grewal and Kaplan 2001:673). We decry "oppression" in non-Western countries as if these women would be more liberated with Western notions. We demand that they exchange a hijab for thongs. FGM for higher incidents of rape. A burqua for Strippercise. Ah, the "freedom" of "democratic choice!" Grewal and Kaplan (2001: 669) write, "Thus the global feminist is one who has free choice over her body and a complete and intact rather than a fragmented or surgically altered body." Should my lipstick be in rose petal or pink lemonade?
In the same way that white feminists have colonized the experiences of women of color through interpreting them in the eyes of white feminism, Western (usually white) feminists have colonized the experiences of non-Western, Global South women through interpreting them in the eyes of Western feminism. Mohanty's well-published 1984 essay and 2003 reprisal document how, "people of and from the Third World live not only under Western eyes, but also within them." We must remember who is documenting these accounts of 'Third World women's' experiences. It is for that reason we must, as Mohanty argues, "look upward," and refocus our attention on how the legacy of colonialism is perpetuated by the colonizer.
The cost of the rescue fantasy is not just to Global South women, but to U.S. women stratified on various axes of oppression. Mohanty writes that "sisterhood cannot be presumed on the basis of gender," and this is as true locally as it is globally. We must scrutinize the ways in which our brazen attempts to 'save' Global South women have cost us our abilities to save ourselves. Her nod toward the prison industrial complex and religious fundamentalism of our own indicate how much domestic work remains. Perhaps we should take the less glamourous path and account for local disarray.
Perhaps our global work should start at home.
I am not sure if this woman had ever been to an African country, much less if she had ever spoken to groups that practice genital cutting. Despite this, she was certain it was definitively different and definitively worse than genital cutting in the U.S. She was so sure that nothing could convince her otherwise, not even testimonies by those who have suffered incredible emotional and physical damage as a result of these 'compassionate' gender assignment surgeries performed without their consent.
Let me start by saying that ranking oppressions is futile and unhelpful - ultimately, both practices involve surgical procedures on healthy, functioning genitals. But this white woman was so sure that liberating darker-skinned girls from the throes of their culture's religious practices was preferable to - even a more worthwhile cause than - liberating U.S. babies from the throes of their culture's medical practices (which are informed by its religious practices, to be sure).
It seems far more appealing to be an advocate for monolithic Third World women rather than to understand and account for our own domestic hierarchies. This is the face of "the fantasy of rescue" (Grewal and Kaplan 2001:673). We decry "oppression" in non-Western countries as if these women would be more liberated with Western notions. We demand that they exchange a hijab for thongs. FGM for higher incidents of rape. A burqua for Strippercise. Ah, the "freedom" of "democratic choice!" Grewal and Kaplan (2001: 669) write, "Thus the global feminist is one who has free choice over her body and a complete and intact rather than a fragmented or surgically altered body." Should my lipstick be in rose petal or pink lemonade?
In the same way that white feminists have colonized the experiences of women of color through interpreting them in the eyes of white feminism, Western (usually white) feminists have colonized the experiences of non-Western, Global South women through interpreting them in the eyes of Western feminism. Mohanty's well-published 1984 essay and 2003 reprisal document how, "people of and from the Third World live not only under Western eyes, but also within them." We must remember who is documenting these accounts of 'Third World women's' experiences. It is for that reason we must, as Mohanty argues, "look upward," and refocus our attention on how the legacy of colonialism is perpetuated by the colonizer.
The cost of the rescue fantasy is not just to Global South women, but to U.S. women stratified on various axes of oppression. Mohanty writes that "sisterhood cannot be presumed on the basis of gender," and this is as true locally as it is globally. We must scrutinize the ways in which our brazen attempts to 'save' Global South women have cost us our abilities to save ourselves. Her nod toward the prison industrial complex and religious fundamentalism of our own indicate how much domestic work remains. Perhaps we should take the less glamourous path and account for local disarray.
Perhaps our global work should start at home.
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Forgetting our elders, forgetting our past
Yesterday, my class had the honor of hearing from two women who helped found the Women's Studies department at my university. One spoke of her feminist awakening after reading a pamphlet on the political economy of women in 1969. She explained how, of course, it is all very clear in hindsight that women were second-class citizens, but it wasn't until she read this pamphlet that she realized there was another way to be. Shortly afterward, the women, both English professors, started a course on women's literature and then founded the teaching collective (which still exists) in 1977. It took nearly 20 years from the time they first course the women's literature to found the Women's Studies master's degree program, a program that has experienced dramatic funding setbacks even within the time that I have been at this university. The teaching collective they began is in a very different place today, in part because feminism and Women's Studies is in a very different place today. Their recollections of where it began put where we are now in stark relief.
While they spoke, I was deeply struck by how rarely young feminists speak to or engage our foremothers. It is our loss, because they carry our liberation on their backs. It is in the wrinkles on their face, the mix of joy and mischief in their eyes as they recount the ways they worked within the system to defy it. There is so much that they know that we are in danger of forgetting, and that fear seemed palpable to them, too. They have seen not only gains, but the erosion of those gains as they have aged and as the feminist mantle has been taken on by younger, fresher faces with new initiatives. They've had to watch as feminism (or pseudofeminism) has gone off in directions they may have never predicted or desired. Much has been written about the ageism within feminist activism, but I don't think I felt it so deeply until I was confronted by these brilliant, impossibly brave women whom I would never have otherwise encountered. We have failed to actively center the experiences and memories of these women in our everyday feminism (and maybe not we...maybe I). For that reason, I found their visit personally humbling.
But there are other reasons we must engage our elders that became clear to me while they spoke. We must engage them not just to listen to them and heed their guidance, but to share all of the revolutionary ideas, research, and theories that have followed in the wake of their work. If we do not, we risk losing them - and ourselves - along the way.
Although the format of our class was to ask them questions, near the end of the session, they turned the tables and asked our class a question. They expressed their discomfort about what they saw as the growing conflation of "sex" and "gender" in our theorizing. "Today, when scholars write about 'gender,'" they said, "they use it when they are clearly referring to sex." They wanted to know what this meant and what we made of it. They wanted us to explain why it is that we do it this way, or perhaps, more likely, to tell us that they are concerned that we are doing it.
I found myself uncertain of how to answer their question or to allay their fears. For them, even if they challenged feminine gender presentation, they still identified as "women" and felt very strongly that male/female was the central social hierarchy meant to be dismantled by feminist work. But theorizing has moved into understanding and interrogating gender, not sex. Gender as socialization process. Gender as done. Gender as performance. Gender roles, not sex roles.
I realized in that moment that I had so accepted the favored terminology of gender (well, it is as young as my own scholarship) as being a central problem that I had never thought to understand why elder feminists would find it so threatening. Because it was their fear that was in the subtext of their question, and the worried look on their faces as they asked it. It was not really a question of mixing up words. Rather, they were afraid that, amidst all this gendering, we were losing sight of women.
The point is not that one of us is wrong and the other is right. We have come to understand that sex itself, the material reality of chromosomes and genitalia, is also a social construction. We have begun, in an explosive way, to theorize on trans experiences (also an issue of gender, although the elders contained it within the realm of sex). But the point, really, is not to engage in a debate and convince anyone that either sex or gender is more important - they are both important, and, if anything, feminist scholarship illuminates how very complicated sex and gender as categories of analysis really are.
Instead, the point is to hear what it is our elders are really asking us. Our knowledge is informed by theirs, but it doesn't have to stay the same course or come to the same conclusions. It didn't seem to me that either women expected it to.
What they wanted, though, was to heed us of the dangers ahead if we do forget where it is we came from.
While they spoke, I was deeply struck by how rarely young feminists speak to or engage our foremothers. It is our loss, because they carry our liberation on their backs. It is in the wrinkles on their face, the mix of joy and mischief in their eyes as they recount the ways they worked within the system to defy it. There is so much that they know that we are in danger of forgetting, and that fear seemed palpable to them, too. They have seen not only gains, but the erosion of those gains as they have aged and as the feminist mantle has been taken on by younger, fresher faces with new initiatives. They've had to watch as feminism (or pseudofeminism) has gone off in directions they may have never predicted or desired. Much has been written about the ageism within feminist activism, but I don't think I felt it so deeply until I was confronted by these brilliant, impossibly brave women whom I would never have otherwise encountered. We have failed to actively center the experiences and memories of these women in our everyday feminism (and maybe not we...maybe I). For that reason, I found their visit personally humbling.
But there are other reasons we must engage our elders that became clear to me while they spoke. We must engage them not just to listen to them and heed their guidance, but to share all of the revolutionary ideas, research, and theories that have followed in the wake of their work. If we do not, we risk losing them - and ourselves - along the way.
Although the format of our class was to ask them questions, near the end of the session, they turned the tables and asked our class a question. They expressed their discomfort about what they saw as the growing conflation of "sex" and "gender" in our theorizing. "Today, when scholars write about 'gender,'" they said, "they use it when they are clearly referring to sex." They wanted to know what this meant and what we made of it. They wanted us to explain why it is that we do it this way, or perhaps, more likely, to tell us that they are concerned that we are doing it.
I found myself uncertain of how to answer their question or to allay their fears. For them, even if they challenged feminine gender presentation, they still identified as "women" and felt very strongly that male/female was the central social hierarchy meant to be dismantled by feminist work. But theorizing has moved into understanding and interrogating gender, not sex. Gender as socialization process. Gender as done. Gender as performance. Gender roles, not sex roles.
I realized in that moment that I had so accepted the favored terminology of gender (well, it is as young as my own scholarship) as being a central problem that I had never thought to understand why elder feminists would find it so threatening. Because it was their fear that was in the subtext of their question, and the worried look on their faces as they asked it. It was not really a question of mixing up words. Rather, they were afraid that, amidst all this gendering, we were losing sight of women.
The point is not that one of us is wrong and the other is right. We have come to understand that sex itself, the material reality of chromosomes and genitalia, is also a social construction. We have begun, in an explosive way, to theorize on trans experiences (also an issue of gender, although the elders contained it within the realm of sex). But the point, really, is not to engage in a debate and convince anyone that either sex or gender is more important - they are both important, and, if anything, feminist scholarship illuminates how very complicated sex and gender as categories of analysis really are.
Instead, the point is to hear what it is our elders are really asking us. Our knowledge is informed by theirs, but it doesn't have to stay the same course or come to the same conclusions. It didn't seem to me that either women expected it to.
What they wanted, though, was to heed us of the dangers ahead if we do forget where it is we came from.
Monday, September 6, 2010
Whose humanity?
There is more to feminist methodology than simply employing feminist methods. Presser (2005) argues that we must also be attuned to how gendered power relations play out within the research field itself. She cites the examples of previous scholars who have studied male prisoners and analyze the men's responses as if they have "an existence independent of the interview" (2068). Presser contrasts these examples with her own research experiences with male prisoners, extolling the ways she is situated by the men she interviews as a heterosexual woman, how they craft their own narratives around expectations of hegemonic masculinity, and how she herself claims power or concedes to a subordinate gendered status.
Although Presser (2005:2067-2068) launches a valid critique of how "the humanity of men...is neglected" in much of feminist research on male prisoners, I understand why it may be so hard for female researchers to see a male incarcerated for violence against women as humane. In the case of most of the men in these studies, our social category was subject to his violence. It is very difficult to see a rapist as humane when, because of the social category of your gender, you live every day in fear of rape. As Presser (2005:2069) herself notes that "women researchers...are unlikely to feel at ease interviewing men who have raped and murdered," I would hope her to be more forgiving of past research and the uncomfortable position of women researching male perpetrators. Presser is correct that it is not ultimately helpful for feminist methodology to overlook the humanity of male perpetrators of sexual violence, but it does, from our subjective vantage point, seem extraordinarily inhumane when your social category is disproportionately victimized by them.
If feminist methodology is about reflexivity and being attuned to the social position of our subjects, then we should also be attuned to the pressure we face to humanize what can appear to us as blatant inhumanity. This brings us to the larger issue about the presumptions we face of how our social locations affect our ability to understand or see the humanity of the oppressor. I am conflicted about this argument I am making because I do very much believe that feminism sees and embraces men's humanity, while patriarchy does not. But within a patriarchal discourse, we must consider whose humanity we are privileging.
Recently, I helped out another grad student when she had the students in her class on family violence complete an extensive mock trial project based on actual family violence court cases. I and several other colleagues acted as the 'jury,' hearing the cases and deliberating the decisions. The second and last case we heard was particularly difficult. In it, a woman had shot and killed the husband who had violently abused her for seven years. She was being charged with his murder, but the defense was arguing self-defense by reason of battered women's syndrome.
After hearing the trial, our 'jury' left the classroom to deliberate. Altogether, the jury was made up of three women and two men. Rather quickly, we saw that our deliberations were divided across gender lines. I found myself in the painful position of witnessing men who I very much respect and whose company I enjoy making remarks infused with anti-feminist sentiments. The men argued that the murder was clearly premeditated and were concerned that we were letting the woman "get away" with it.
"She can't just kill him and walk away," said one male. He seemed to suggest that this man's life was still a life wrongfully taken, and that no matter what kind of man he had been when he was alive, his willful murder was wrong and merited penalty in the eyes of the law.
The other man added, "If we let her get off without a penalty, then all the women out there will think they can shoot their husbands and get away with it."
"No," one of my female colleagues rejoined, "all of the man out there will realize they can't beat up their wives and get away with it."
It became clear in that moment that we were approaching the case from distinctly divided gendered angles. The men saw themselves in the dead batterer's position - what if they risked a non-penalized murder for beating their wives? And the women saw themselves in the battered woman's position - what if we were faced with there being no safety other than the death of our batterer? Because that is what we understood to be true about this woman's case - at last he was dead, so at last she was safe from him. What keeps us from these positions of batterer and battered is tenuous and precarious. In the end, the men on the jury were arguing for the dead batterer's humanity, while the women on the jury were arguing for the battered woman's humanity.
Ultimately, we could not convince the men to declare her innocence and they could not convince us to declare her guilt. We returned to the students and announced that we were a hung jury. We each shared our individual verdicts with the class, which revealed the gender divide. One male student asked the women on the jury, rather begrudgingly, "Are y'all three feminists?"
In the eyes of the student (and likely others), for us to be 'feminists' would be the only explanation for why would refuse to imprison a woman who had been psychologically, emotionally, physically, and sexually tortured for seven years. To be humanists doesn't explain it. To recognize her legal rights is not enough, either. Evidently, we must be feminists to come to such a conclusion.
And despite my flippancy, the student unintentionally pointed out the very contribution feminism makes: without feminism, we would never see the humanity of the woman on trial. The men on the jury harped continuously on "the law," on the wording of the charges, on what the defense had suggested and whether that really "proved" anything. In the eyes of the law, they said, the man's murder must be penalized. But the law was not made to protect the other. The law is not an objective truth. Life is far more complicated than the law makes it out to be. The law was stacked against the woman on trial, and it was left up to our jury to determine whether we would dare to take on the complications, dare to trouble ourselves, dare to challenge ourselves to see beyond the law and see her humanity.
And so I caution that recognizing humanity is a risky business, and one to be undertaken carefully and responsibly. For when we are urged to recognize humanity, we must be careful to ask, whose humanity? And in the process of recognizing one person's or one group's humanity, is another's humanity lost? It seems to me that to humanize an individual or group in a way that minimizes the lived experiences of another is a step back from achieving a collective humanity.
Although Presser (2005:2067-2068) launches a valid critique of how "the humanity of men...is neglected" in much of feminist research on male prisoners, I understand why it may be so hard for female researchers to see a male incarcerated for violence against women as humane. In the case of most of the men in these studies, our social category was subject to his violence. It is very difficult to see a rapist as humane when, because of the social category of your gender, you live every day in fear of rape. As Presser (2005:2069) herself notes that "women researchers...are unlikely to feel at ease interviewing men who have raped and murdered," I would hope her to be more forgiving of past research and the uncomfortable position of women researching male perpetrators. Presser is correct that it is not ultimately helpful for feminist methodology to overlook the humanity of male perpetrators of sexual violence, but it does, from our subjective vantage point, seem extraordinarily inhumane when your social category is disproportionately victimized by them.
If feminist methodology is about reflexivity and being attuned to the social position of our subjects, then we should also be attuned to the pressure we face to humanize what can appear to us as blatant inhumanity. This brings us to the larger issue about the presumptions we face of how our social locations affect our ability to understand or see the humanity of the oppressor. I am conflicted about this argument I am making because I do very much believe that feminism sees and embraces men's humanity, while patriarchy does not. But within a patriarchal discourse, we must consider whose humanity we are privileging.
Recently, I helped out another grad student when she had the students in her class on family violence complete an extensive mock trial project based on actual family violence court cases. I and several other colleagues acted as the 'jury,' hearing the cases and deliberating the decisions. The second and last case we heard was particularly difficult. In it, a woman had shot and killed the husband who had violently abused her for seven years. She was being charged with his murder, but the defense was arguing self-defense by reason of battered women's syndrome.
After hearing the trial, our 'jury' left the classroom to deliberate. Altogether, the jury was made up of three women and two men. Rather quickly, we saw that our deliberations were divided across gender lines. I found myself in the painful position of witnessing men who I very much respect and whose company I enjoy making remarks infused with anti-feminist sentiments. The men argued that the murder was clearly premeditated and were concerned that we were letting the woman "get away" with it.
"She can't just kill him and walk away," said one male. He seemed to suggest that this man's life was still a life wrongfully taken, and that no matter what kind of man he had been when he was alive, his willful murder was wrong and merited penalty in the eyes of the law.
The other man added, "If we let her get off without a penalty, then all the women out there will think they can shoot their husbands and get away with it."
"No," one of my female colleagues rejoined, "all of the man out there will realize they can't beat up their wives and get away with it."
It became clear in that moment that we were approaching the case from distinctly divided gendered angles. The men saw themselves in the dead batterer's position - what if they risked a non-penalized murder for beating their wives? And the women saw themselves in the battered woman's position - what if we were faced with there being no safety other than the death of our batterer? Because that is what we understood to be true about this woman's case - at last he was dead, so at last she was safe from him. What keeps us from these positions of batterer and battered is tenuous and precarious. In the end, the men on the jury were arguing for the dead batterer's humanity, while the women on the jury were arguing for the battered woman's humanity.
Ultimately, we could not convince the men to declare her innocence and they could not convince us to declare her guilt. We returned to the students and announced that we were a hung jury. We each shared our individual verdicts with the class, which revealed the gender divide. One male student asked the women on the jury, rather begrudgingly, "Are y'all three feminists?"
In the eyes of the student (and likely others), for us to be 'feminists' would be the only explanation for why would refuse to imprison a woman who had been psychologically, emotionally, physically, and sexually tortured for seven years. To be humanists doesn't explain it. To recognize her legal rights is not enough, either. Evidently, we must be feminists to come to such a conclusion.
And despite my flippancy, the student unintentionally pointed out the very contribution feminism makes: without feminism, we would never see the humanity of the woman on trial. The men on the jury harped continuously on "the law," on the wording of the charges, on what the defense had suggested and whether that really "proved" anything. In the eyes of the law, they said, the man's murder must be penalized. But the law was not made to protect the other. The law is not an objective truth. Life is far more complicated than the law makes it out to be. The law was stacked against the woman on trial, and it was left up to our jury to determine whether we would dare to take on the complications, dare to trouble ourselves, dare to challenge ourselves to see beyond the law and see her humanity.
And so I caution that recognizing humanity is a risky business, and one to be undertaken carefully and responsibly. For when we are urged to recognize humanity, we must be careful to ask, whose humanity? And in the process of recognizing one person's or one group's humanity, is another's humanity lost? It seems to me that to humanize an individual or group in a way that minimizes the lived experiences of another is a step back from achieving a collective humanity.
Sunday, September 5, 2010
The gift of objectivity is granted to its grantees
Last week, I received the course evaluations back for my course on the sociology of gender (and I could add here, from a feminist methodological standpoint, that the university's standardized mix of quantitative and qualitative measurements is a pitiful attempt where neither quantitative nor qualitative data are at all helpful in improving the way a course is taught) . Like any class, there is always that one student, or, in larger classes, that handful of students, who seem to have either a personal vendetta against you or those who seem never to consider the fact that you will actually read what they write and it will crush your young, budding pedagogical soul. (Eventually, I'm told, you get cynical about such comments, one day shout, "f this s!" and start delivering crusty lectures and multiple choice exams in bitter resignation). In my case, one student wrote on my evaluations that the readings in my class were "biased" and that it would have been "interesting to see how a man would have taught this course" differently.
Because I am read as 'woman,' my teaching gender - since "gender," as we know, is coded "woman," where "woman" is "other" and "man" is neutral - is always already perceived as biased. I felt as though I had not reached that student with the very core, fundamental point of my course: gender is as real as we make it, and indeed, we make it very, very real. But I no more represent a static 'woman's perspective' than any male-identified person represents a static 'man's perspective.' And even if a man were to teach the class, he could teach it with a far more progressive bent than I ever could, simply because his privileged status meant he could afford to. While my push for a feminist analysis will be taken as bias, his push for a feminist analysis will be taken as objective truth. That is, of course, if he is white, suitably masculine, dressed well, and speaks unaccented English (although a British accent would suffice). And while I assume I can generally pass as straight, this hypothetical male instructor would be doomed if he was read in the slightest bit as gay, because of course the only reason that a man would be invested in women's general welfare would be because he wants to date...men?
The point I am trying to make is that gender as a social institution has such a hold on us that we can hardly fathom the myriad of ways in which we are sorted or sort each other. Gender remains a formidable institutional force and principle of social organization, and yet its more insidious means of perpetuating inequality in the post-second wave feminist era are so taken for granted that most of us don't recognize it. And when we teach it, we are greeting over two decades of brilliantly invasive socialization, from before birth ("Is it a boy or a girl?") to young adulthood. After a six week course attempting to pull back the curtain to reveal the socially-generated and structurally-reinforced hold gender has on our lives, a student can still conclude, "Nah. Pretty sure gender is a static binary, LOL."
Our struggles amongst ourselves speak to the problems we confront in transforming our students - we ourselves are not yet transformed, or even all that sure of what we want to transform into. Even after forty years of women's studies as an academic discipline (and several hundred years of feminist scholarship), we are still striving to legitimize a feminist lens in the academy. We are still making the same arguments about how the methods we are critiquing are not objective or unbiased, but rather very much political, very much a value judgment.
Beetham and Demetriades (2007) gesture to this when they chronicle how a gendered scholarship is always changing - in their case, from a 'women in development' framework to a 'gender and development' framework following a post-colonial and racial critique - and yet we are still challenging the same old "mainstream" perspective on measurement. We have reached a point where qualitative and quantitative parties are not the same embittered, divided camps they once were, and those with a gendered lens often see the benefits of mixed methods and lend valuable critiques of how quantitative methods can better measure gendered experiences. We may have our own "healthy internal debate" and work across disciplines and methodologies (Fonow and Cook 2005), which is all well and good, but still struggle to defend a gendered perspective to those who believe that objective, value-free research 1) exists, 2) is empirically, epistemologically, and methodologically doable, and 3) done by them. We still struggle to convince these researchers - and the realm of the non-academy, where polls and numbers are presented to the public as flat, objective assertions, and our students, who assure us that they are each individuals of their own making and already experts on the social world - of their own subjectivity and political positions.
In White Logic, White Methods (2008), Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva write, "Ah, whiteness grants the gift of external objectivity to its grantees!" And indeed we could say the same about middle-classness, maleness, about heterosexuality, about able-bodiedness, about any privileged position. Those who make the rules or who occupy the same categories as those who made the rules, those whose identities are so normalized as the golden standard as to be rendered invisible to the souls that occupy them, lay claim to such 'objectivity' in the face of any challenges to the contrary. And those who do not occupy those positions can still be so profoundly colonized by these privileged, normative views that they come to believe them to be the objective, unbiased real.
Feminist scholarship was never a monolithic or single-perspective to begin with, but as feminist scholarship has integrated into the academy, we must be careful to see the ways in which our defense of our frameworks as legitimate and necessary weakens. I worry that, as feminist scholars have increasingly become the "gatekeepers' to an academy where they were once "on the outside looking in" (Fonrow and Cook 2005: 2230), we are in danger of our own bias being eroded. If we make the dangerous claim that "the product of any research process is a construction of, not a reflection of, what the reality is about" (Fonrow and Cook 2005:2221), we must be careful not to lose sight of the very real power imbalances that permeate the constructions and not back ourselves into a corner where a feminist lens can be minimized or de-legitimated as merely a construction of reality. We are especially susceptible to such critiques by virtue of our position on the axes of oppression - if we are poor, if we are female, if we are transgendered, if we are people of color, if we are queer. To those that inevitably tell us, "That is your construction," we must say, "Yes, but my construction and representation illuminates the construction and representation of yours."
We must also rethink our strategy, because perhaps there is a construction or version of reality that is more accurate than others. There is a construction that is less oppressive, less silencing, and more holistic. There are methodologies that get us there more effectively than others. We should be at peace with, and not apologize for, how our "bias" is one that can transform, if we dare it to. Feminist methodology allows for us to name where it is we stand and not deceive ourselves that we are otherwise; it also allows for us to envision a more compassionate, humane way to be. I will continue to teach with "bias," yes, but with the bias that offers liberation, transformation, and an alternate view of what is true and possible. A bias that, hopefully, shows just how biased we already were.
Because I am read as 'woman,' my teaching gender - since "gender," as we know, is coded "woman," where "woman" is "other" and "man" is neutral - is always already perceived as biased. I felt as though I had not reached that student with the very core, fundamental point of my course: gender is as real as we make it, and indeed, we make it very, very real. But I no more represent a static 'woman's perspective' than any male-identified person represents a static 'man's perspective.' And even if a man were to teach the class, he could teach it with a far more progressive bent than I ever could, simply because his privileged status meant he could afford to. While my push for a feminist analysis will be taken as bias, his push for a feminist analysis will be taken as objective truth. That is, of course, if he is white, suitably masculine, dressed well, and speaks unaccented English (although a British accent would suffice). And while I assume I can generally pass as straight, this hypothetical male instructor would be doomed if he was read in the slightest bit as gay, because of course the only reason that a man would be invested in women's general welfare would be because he wants to date...men?
The point I am trying to make is that gender as a social institution has such a hold on us that we can hardly fathom the myriad of ways in which we are sorted or sort each other. Gender remains a formidable institutional force and principle of social organization, and yet its more insidious means of perpetuating inequality in the post-second wave feminist era are so taken for granted that most of us don't recognize it. And when we teach it, we are greeting over two decades of brilliantly invasive socialization, from before birth ("Is it a boy or a girl?") to young adulthood. After a six week course attempting to pull back the curtain to reveal the socially-generated and structurally-reinforced hold gender has on our lives, a student can still conclude, "Nah. Pretty sure gender is a static binary, LOL."
Our struggles amongst ourselves speak to the problems we confront in transforming our students - we ourselves are not yet transformed, or even all that sure of what we want to transform into. Even after forty years of women's studies as an academic discipline (and several hundred years of feminist scholarship), we are still striving to legitimize a feminist lens in the academy. We are still making the same arguments about how the methods we are critiquing are not objective or unbiased, but rather very much political, very much a value judgment.
Beetham and Demetriades (2007) gesture to this when they chronicle how a gendered scholarship is always changing - in their case, from a 'women in development' framework to a 'gender and development' framework following a post-colonial and racial critique - and yet we are still challenging the same old "mainstream" perspective on measurement. We have reached a point where qualitative and quantitative parties are not the same embittered, divided camps they once were, and those with a gendered lens often see the benefits of mixed methods and lend valuable critiques of how quantitative methods can better measure gendered experiences. We may have our own "healthy internal debate" and work across disciplines and methodologies (Fonow and Cook 2005), which is all well and good, but still struggle to defend a gendered perspective to those who believe that objective, value-free research 1) exists, 2) is empirically, epistemologically, and methodologically doable, and 3) done by them. We still struggle to convince these researchers - and the realm of the non-academy, where polls and numbers are presented to the public as flat, objective assertions, and our students, who assure us that they are each individuals of their own making and already experts on the social world - of their own subjectivity and political positions.
In White Logic, White Methods (2008), Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva write, "Ah, whiteness grants the gift of external objectivity to its grantees!" And indeed we could say the same about middle-classness, maleness, about heterosexuality, about able-bodiedness, about any privileged position. Those who make the rules or who occupy the same categories as those who made the rules, those whose identities are so normalized as the golden standard as to be rendered invisible to the souls that occupy them, lay claim to such 'objectivity' in the face of any challenges to the contrary. And those who do not occupy those positions can still be so profoundly colonized by these privileged, normative views that they come to believe them to be the objective, unbiased real.
Feminist scholarship was never a monolithic or single-perspective to begin with, but as feminist scholarship has integrated into the academy, we must be careful to see the ways in which our defense of our frameworks as legitimate and necessary weakens. I worry that, as feminist scholars have increasingly become the "gatekeepers' to an academy where they were once "on the outside looking in" (Fonrow and Cook 2005: 2230), we are in danger of our own bias being eroded. If we make the dangerous claim that "the product of any research process is a construction of, not a reflection of, what the reality is about" (Fonrow and Cook 2005:2221), we must be careful not to lose sight of the very real power imbalances that permeate the constructions and not back ourselves into a corner where a feminist lens can be minimized or de-legitimated as merely a construction of reality. We are especially susceptible to such critiques by virtue of our position on the axes of oppression - if we are poor, if we are female, if we are transgendered, if we are people of color, if we are queer. To those that inevitably tell us, "That is your construction," we must say, "Yes, but my construction and representation illuminates the construction and representation of yours."
We must also rethink our strategy, because perhaps there is a construction or version of reality that is more accurate than others. There is a construction that is less oppressive, less silencing, and more holistic. There are methodologies that get us there more effectively than others. We should be at peace with, and not apologize for, how our "bias" is one that can transform, if we dare it to. Feminist methodology allows for us to name where it is we stand and not deceive ourselves that we are otherwise; it also allows for us to envision a more compassionate, humane way to be. I will continue to teach with "bias," yes, but with the bias that offers liberation, transformation, and an alternate view of what is true and possible. A bias that, hopefully, shows just how biased we already were.
Saturday, September 4, 2010
Into the strenuous briefness...
And so this blog is born.
It is the initiative of a graduate seminar course where we are called on to offer a public vision of our intellectual lives, particularly as we cultivate our feminist scholarship. The hope is that we can build an academic classroom community through digital participatory learning. Although reflections on this readings are soon to come, for now I wanted to offer a public 'hello.'
I take the title from an e. e. cummings poem shared with me several years ago by a dear friend. She once filled a box of drawings, phrases, quotes from books and our long emails to each other, cutouts of pretty pictures, and so many beautiful poems, including "into the strenuous briefness" by cummings. She titled the box itself "the box of love, love, and joy," and she gave to me one Valentine's Day with the idea, I think, that there are infinite varieties of deep and meaningful relationships that should be honored, not just on one commercial day a year, but every day. The box is with me still, even though I am far from her, and I can read through it and feel the warmth radiate from the scraps of paper.
into the strenuous briefness
by e. e. cummings
into the strenuous briefness
Life:
handorgans and April
darkness, friends
i charge laughing.
Into the hair-thin tints
of yellow dawn,
into the women-coloured twilight
i smilingly glide. I
into the big vermilion departure
swim, sayingly;
(Do you think?) the
i do, world
is probably made
of roses & hello:
(of solongs and, ashes)
This poem is one that leaves you with a feeling of profoundness and poignancy and whimsical, airy possibility. He captures those moments where we stand, surveying where we are and what we have, and feel so light and yet so weighty with the fullness of it all. Cummings calls on the coexisting brilliant and ephemeral qualities of life, the way we both begin and end with each breath.
I have heard of no better description of life than the strenuous briefness - it is short, it is hard, it is breathtaking, it is heart wrenching, it is wonderful.
And the question remains - between the roses and the ashes, what will we do with the little time we have?
It is the initiative of a graduate seminar course where we are called on to offer a public vision of our intellectual lives, particularly as we cultivate our feminist scholarship. The hope is that we can build an academic classroom community through digital participatory learning. Although reflections on this readings are soon to come, for now I wanted to offer a public 'hello.'
I take the title from an e. e. cummings poem shared with me several years ago by a dear friend. She once filled a box of drawings, phrases, quotes from books and our long emails to each other, cutouts of pretty pictures, and so many beautiful poems, including "into the strenuous briefness" by cummings. She titled the box itself "the box of love, love, and joy," and she gave to me one Valentine's Day with the idea, I think, that there are infinite varieties of deep and meaningful relationships that should be honored, not just on one commercial day a year, but every day. The box is with me still, even though I am far from her, and I can read through it and feel the warmth radiate from the scraps of paper.
into the strenuous briefness
by e. e. cummings
into the strenuous briefness
Life:
handorgans and April
darkness, friends
i charge laughing.
Into the hair-thin tints
of yellow dawn,
into the women-coloured twilight
i smilingly glide. I
into the big vermilion departure
swim, sayingly;
(Do you think?) the
i do, world
is probably made
of roses & hello:
(of solongs and, ashes)
This poem is one that leaves you with a feeling of profoundness and poignancy and whimsical, airy possibility. He captures those moments where we stand, surveying where we are and what we have, and feel so light and yet so weighty with the fullness of it all. Cummings calls on the coexisting brilliant and ephemeral qualities of life, the way we both begin and end with each breath.
I have heard of no better description of life than the strenuous briefness - it is short, it is hard, it is breathtaking, it is heart wrenching, it is wonderful.
And the question remains - between the roses and the ashes, what will we do with the little time we have?
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